This big-ticket purchase may be a 'grenade in your otherwise well-planned retirement,' advisor warns - CNBC   

Americans are at risk of falling short of what they may need to live on financially in retirement.

One potential reason is lifestyle creep, or the tendency to upgrade your lifestyle as you earn more.

An upgrade people are often tempted to make - the purchase of a second home - may be particularly risky for long-term planning, financial advisors say.

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Are You a Toxic Person? Here's How to Tell - Inc.com   

Are you a toxic person? I'm betting your answer is, "No, of course not!" Most of us think of ourselves as kindly and benevolent or, at worst, a little gruff at times but generally good-hearted.

Unfortunately, though, you may not know what effect the things you do and say have on other people. What seemed like good-natured ribbing to you might have been deeply hurtful to someone else. A criticism that you thought was no big deal might have left your co-worker feeling insecure for days. You may have thought you were entertaining your employees with great stories about your exploits when they were only listening because they had to, and were waiting impatiently for a chance to slip away.

Toxic people may only be toxic in certain situations. You could be a wonderful parent and spouse but a tyrant at work. Or a great boss and mentor to the salespeople who work for you but an ogre to your interns. If you are a jerk to some people in some situations, it may be hard to find that out because if you ask, you're unlikely to get an honest answer.

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The U.S. Government UFO Cover-Up Is Real—But It’s Not What You Think - The Atlantic   

Decades of declassified memos, internal reports, and study projects create the sense that the government doesn’t have satisfying answers for the most perplexing sightings.

There aren’t many secrets that John Brennan doesn’t know. He spent 25 years in the CIA, became the White House homeland-security adviser, and then returned to the CIA as its director. If a question interested him, he could’ve commanded legions of analysts, officers, surveillance networks, and tools to find the answer. Yet in a December 2020 interview with the economist Tyler Cowen, Brennan admitted, somewhat tortuously, that he was flummoxed by the wave of recent reporting about UFOs: “Some of the phenomena we’re going to be seeing continues to be unexplained and might, in fact, be some type of phenomenon that is the result of something that we don’t yet understand and that could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life.”

That roundabout and convoluted comment piqued my interest. Anything that puzzled Brennan was worth looking into. For the next two years, I dove into the history of the U.S. government’s involvement in UFOs as part of writing my new book, and along the way I’ve become convinced that a cover-up is real—it’s just not the one that you think. Plenty of revelations, declassified documents, and public reports suggest active, ongoing deception. Even today, the government is surely hiding information about its knowledge and working theories about what exists in the skies above.

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Which countries get the best night’s sleep? - The Economist   

SLEEP IS ESSENTIAL to human health. It takes up around one-third of people’s lives. And yet surprisingly little is known about it. Understanding of how sleep varies across countries is particularly limited. It is well known, for example, that people in east Asia tend to sleep less than those in America or Europe, but not whether the quality of their sleep is better or worse. Surveys show that some countries are peopled by night owls, but others by early birds. But why this is so remains an open question.

A new paper attempts to fill some of the gaps. Using anonymised data collected from a popular wearable device between January 2021 and January 2022, researchers from the National University of Singapore and Oura Health, a Finnish sleep-tech startup, analysed the sleep habits of more than 220,000 people across 35 countries. Whereas sleep research has historically relied on survey data collected from a small number of people at a single point in time, sleep-tracker apps can track sleep objectively, from the movements, heart rates and body temperatures of large samples of users over long periods. You can see how countries stacked up in our interactive Lie-in-dex below.

The researchers found that sleep patterns vary considerably across countries. As expected, the worst sleepers are mainly in Asian countries, where on a typical weeknight people snooze for less than six and a half hours—roughly 30 minutes less than those in the rest of the world. The best sleepers are mainly in northern European countries (Estonia, Finland, Ireland and the Netherlands) and in Australia and New Zealand, where users log a solid seven hours on average. Bedtimes and wake-up times tend to move together (see chart), though the authors note that Asian sleepers tend to fall asleep 35 minutes later than the average, and wake up around the same time as people elsewhere.

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